Harrowing photos of woman shows devastating effect of drugs before tragic death
Harrowing photos show the devastating effect drugs had on a woman before her tragic death.
Helen Stobbart struggled for years with substance abuse and mental health issues before her death aged 51 last May.
Mum Sue Charlesworth has spoken of her shock at the rapid deterioration of her daughter in the months before she died.
In a desperate bid to save her life, she even tried to have Helen sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
However, she failed to meet the criteria following an assessment and died a month later.
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Helen grew up in Rawmarsh, South Yorkshire. Her parents split up when she was five.
Sue recalls her daughter telling her she had been given whisky at her dad's house when she was nine.
She later discovered Helen had been using her lunch money to buy lager while at secondary school.
Helen's life was riddled with trauma (Sue Charlesworth)
In the months before her death, Helen quickly deteriorated (Sue Charlesworth)She later found work as a shop assistant in Rotherham and then moved abroad to work in Zante and Crete.
"She had such a lovely personality and she would do anything for anyone, that was part of what made her so vulnerable," Sue told YorkshireLive.
"She was really trusting and people would take advantage of that.
"Throughout her life, she ended up in a lot of abusive relationships with men but was stuck with them. She'd be beaten up badly but would never say anything, it was always 'oh I fell' or something like that."
As Helen's life spiralled out of control, she would become known to a number of services across Rotherham, responsible for mental health and addiction. These included Change Grow Live (CGL) and the NHS Rotherham Doncaster and South Humber (RDaSH) crisis team.
Helen was rushed to Rotherham Hospital in May last year (Yorkshire Live/MEN Media)Sue said she thought Helen had first started using cannabis in her teens before moving into harder drugs in her 20s. By the end, it was a lethal mix of heroin, crack cocaine, and methadone.
The end for Helen came after she had been admitted to Rotherham General Hospital due to a suspected overdose on May 21, before she died three days later.
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Her medical cause of death would be asphyxiation due to a cocktail of drugs in her system.
Sue said she and Helen had endured a rocky relationship, but she had become increasingly worried about her daughter's appearance in the months before she died.
When she was admitted to hospital, she had a BMI of just 17.6 and a number of serious injuries.
An inquest at Doncaster Coroners Court on Thursday heard from representatives from CGL, RDaSH and South Yorkshire Housing Association (SYHA) who had all had contact with Helen in the months before her death.
She remained living in a flat strewn with uncapped needles, in a situation that had seen her cuckooed in the past.
Helen had asked the authorities to move her out of the community.
She had a number of diagnoses in regard to her mental health over the years from borderline personality disorder to bipolar disorder.
These mental health struggles and her battle with addiction would mean her cooperation with services trying to help her was patchy.
Sue believed that if her addiction and mental health struggles had been treated as one - under what is known as a 'dual diagnosis' - she may have met the threshold to be taken into medical detention that April.
However, as it stood, Helen didn't meet the criteria to be admitted for her mental health alone and expressed no desire to be admitted herself.
Area Coroner Mrs Louise Slater was satisfied that the assessment from the multi-agency team did all it could within the scope of the criteria it was working with.
She noted agencies had gone 'above and beyond' to try and engage Helen on multiple occasions.
Mrs Slater said: "I accept it must be incredibly difficult to see someone who you love so dearly deteriorate so much and Helen's mum did everything right to try and help her."
Helen's death at the age of 51 was ruled a drug-related death. The medical cause of death was asphyxiation due to use of heroin, crack cocaine and methadone.
However, Sue still believes that her death was preventable and detaining her would have saved her life.
"When I saw Helen, the way she had become it was traumatic for me," she said.
"It was upsetting and it was very clear to me that something needed to be done to help her immediately. Anyone could have seen that it was out of control.
"I had the feeling straight away, you just knew looking at her that she was going to die. And she did."
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